1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of e-business, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for simulating application workloads on an e-business application server.
2. Description of the Related Art
The pervasiveness of the Internet has allowed companies to exploit electronic communications to engage in what is commonly known as e-business activities with their customers. E-business involves conducting business on the Internet and not only includes buying and selling goods and services, but also includes servicing customers and collaborating with trading or business partners. To accommodate this vast range of activities, companies engaging in e-business have to ensure that their systems can optimally handle website traffic by implementing an effective traffic flow management policy.
A traffic flow management policy is a set of rules which dictate how workload should be handled by a system and its subsystems. A workload is a task or group of tasks that require system resources for processing. A work request can be used to initiate processing of a workload. An effective traffic flow management policy must assign and distribute tasks associated with a workload to various processing elements within the system and its subsystems. Moreover, to ensure optimal performance, the traffic flow management policy must constantly monitor system conditions and dynamically adjust the workload accordingly. Dynamic adjustment can include redistributing and rescheduling the tasks associated with a workload for processing.
E-business systems present a unique set of challenges to providing an effective traffic flow management policy. In e-business systems, legitimate overload conditions occur frequently and are generally unpredictable. A legitimate overload condition may result from several load factors which can include an increase in user demand, a partial website outage, and even the elimination of previous bottlenecks. For example, an increased user demand can occur when there are special events, promotions, and marketing campaigns. Furthermore, when overload occurs, system performance is significantly degraded and this results in diminished capacity. From an economic perspective, the diminished capacity results in lost opportunity which translates directly to lost revenue. Consequently, a provider utilizing an e-business system wants some assurance that its system is robust enough to effectively handle overload conditions.
Given the unique challenges presented by e-business systems, what is needed is an efficient method and system for ensuring that existing traffic flow management policies can effectively accommodate overload conditions.